4 ms·

I lived and worked throughout Berkeley, San Jose, Cupertino, Marin County from '80-'95. I've been in the original Apple office. I remember 280 before all the CI

by scrubs 4y ago

I lived and worked throughout Berkeley, San Jose, Cupertino, Marin County from '80-'95. I've been in the original Apple office. I remember 280 before all the CISCO and Oracle buildings went up. I have my share of stories. Still I feel like us old guys have got to have more on the ball for the new-comers than (i) memories (ii) rants about how it used to be. A psychologist once pointed out old people go to memories if they've got nothing going on now. I like Warren Buffet's line noted for not investing in tech: I might be old fashioned but I'm not old fashioned stupid. Part of having gray hairs is to know what was stuck-on-stupid then, and not repeat it now. Part of having those gray hairs is a Peter Drucker take on business: factual, direct, and unsentimental but not mean. The future (i.e. today relative to '89) isn't always better.

mobilene 4y ago
You're right, but there's also room for an old guy to reminisce on an anniversary.
mlyle 4y ago
Meh. I'm a decade or two younger than you, and I've got plenty of stuff going on, but I'm still so drawn to sentimentalism. I miss workstations and the feeling of quality. I miss slapping in a router and having connectivity. I miss the sheer degree of early 2000's brogrammer tomfoolery. I miss BBSes and local community. I miss usenet. I miss the sense that IPC and single thread performance was gonna increase forever. I miss having a T1 to my apartment and playing with frame relay and Serious HiCap Telco Circuits (tm). I miss HalTed and the maker movement before we called it a maker movement. Man, we've got such great stuff now. I've got a home 2gbps PON link and 10 gigabit ethernet everywhere and plastic crappy machines that are 20 million times faster than that decked out SPARCStation 20 and more IOPS than I could have ever imagined. But why'd it have to eat all the best parts of those things? (I know why, but that doesn't mean I have to like it...)
- eps 4y ago
  Yeah, the whoomp of a CRT monitor powering up, the sound of a modem handshake at 2am and the flex of 5" floppies. Good memories of times never to return. But that's just nostalgie.
  - IntelMiner 4y ago
    I picked up an old CRT at Seattle's RePC a few months ago. An absolutely massive 1600 x 1200 (at 85 Hz!) thing The first thing I did after powering it on was hit that degauss button, and my god the feeling The bastard clonnnggeddd so loud my roommate heard it through the floor!
    - xnx 4y ago
      I forgot all about degaussing!
- drewzero1 4y ago
  I drooled over all that stuff but couldn't afford it. Now I might be able to afford some of the workstations I coveted as a kid, but they can hardly do anything by today's standards. Some of them can heat a room pretty well at least.
  - mlyle 4y ago
    The stuff I like is from an era where machines weren't too power hungry. Typical supplies were 150W, though not very efficient. The main thing is-- it was all very nice sheet metal; they'd thought about RAS, etc; tantalum capacitors everywhere instead of aluminum electrolytic; etc. Today, machines probably have a much longer useful life than ever before, but are built more cheaply and disposable than before. If you buy a high-end ThinkStation or whatever, you basically get an ordinary PC with a nicer CPU inside. I resented my dad buying a PS/2 when I was growing up because it had poor game compatibility and couldn't run (early) Linux... acquired one for nostalgia and found that it has a whole lot of the things I liked about late 90's Unix workstations inside.
msla 4y ago
> Part of having gray hairs is to know what was stuck-on-stupid then, and not repeat it now. Yeah, remember the utter idiocy of Pets.com? Imagine: Trying to sell stuff directly to consumers on the World Wide Web! Certainly wouldn't want to invest in a business that would try that tomfoolery again.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mlyle 4y ago
  While it eventually became feasible to ship pet food at not too much of an economic disadvantage... it's only possible to do so for the largest players and they're still not really making money on the transaction. If we ever get serious about taxing carbon it'll become pretty seriously uneconomic again.

by scrubs 4y ago

mobilene 4y ago

You're right, but there's also room for an old guy to reminisce on an anniversary.

mlyle 4y ago

Meh. I'm a decade or two younger than you, and I've got plenty of stuff going on, but I'm still so drawn to sentimentalism. I miss workstations and the feeling of quality. I miss slapping in a router and having connectivity. I miss the sheer degree of early 2000's brogrammer tomfoolery. I miss BBSes and local community. I miss usenet. I miss the sense that IPC and single thread performance was gonna increase forever. I miss having a T1 to my apartment and playing with frame relay and Serious HiCap Telco Circuits (tm). I miss HalTed and the maker movement before we called it a maker movement. Man, we've got such great stuff now. I've got a home 2gbps PON link and 10 gigabit ethernet everywhere and plastic crappy machines that are 20 million times faster than that decked out SPARCStation 20 and more IOPS than I could have ever imagined. But why'd it have to eat all the best parts of those things? (I know why, but that doesn't mean I have to like it...)

eps 4y ago
Yeah, the whoomp of a CRT monitor powering up, the sound of a modem handshake at 2am and the flex of 5" floppies. Good memories of times never to return. But that's just nostalgie.
- IntelMiner 4y ago
  I picked up an old CRT at Seattle's RePC a few months ago. An absolutely massive 1600 x 1200 (at 85 Hz!) thing The first thing I did after powering it on was hit that degauss button, and my god the feeling The bastard clonnnggeddd so loud my roommate heard it through the floor!
  - xnx 4y ago
    I forgot all about degaussing!
drewzero1 4y ago
I drooled over all that stuff but couldn't afford it. Now I might be able to afford some of the workstations I coveted as a kid, but they can hardly do anything by today's standards. Some of them can heat a room pretty well at least.
- mlyle 4y ago
  The stuff I like is from an era where machines weren't too power hungry. Typical supplies were 150W, though not very efficient. The main thing is-- it was all very nice sheet metal; they'd thought about RAS, etc; tantalum capacitors everywhere instead of aluminum electrolytic; etc. Today, machines probably have a much longer useful life than ever before, but are built more cheaply and disposable than before. If you buy a high-end ThinkStation or whatever, you basically get an ordinary PC with a nicer CPU inside. I resented my dad buying a PS/2 when I was growing up because it had poor game compatibility and couldn't run (early) Linux... acquired one for nostalgia and found that it has a whole lot of the things I liked about late 90's Unix workstations inside.

msla 4y ago

> Part of having gray hairs is to know what was stuck-on-stupid then, and not repeat it now. Yeah, remember the utter idiocy of Pets.com? Imagine: Trying to sell stuff directly to consumers on the World Wide Web! Certainly wouldn't want to invest in a business that would try that tomfoolery again.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mlyle 4y ago
While it eventually became feasible to ship pet food at not too much of an economic disadvantage... it's only possible to do so for the largest players and they're still not really making money on the transaction. If we ever get serious about taxing carbon it'll become pretty seriously uneconomic again.